A Pain In The Chest

I dislike people who overreact. Why? Because it's annoying. We're not in the medieval ages, for chrissakes, with their snuff boxes and salts and corsets. We're in the 21st century when romance is better expressed inside, like muriatic acid eating through a bloated drain. Expressing it otherwise makes whatever it is you're expressing about trite, common, inane. The world is too much nowadays. Making a big deal of it rather insults it.

There is this one person, however, whom I know. She overreacts about totally unimportant things. Sometimes it gives me a pain in the chest to watch her do it, and sometimes I watch other people's faces watching her with a kind of embarrassed apology to no one in general, and to themselves specifically, looking as if they have a similar pain in the chest. The feeling of observing her is very close to revulsion, for me. But it's not revulsion. I find her antics charming.

She seems to have never grown up. No, no, not in that conscious, offending way that some people do and take pride of. She hit ten and she stopped. That's it. Her boobs grew out, the blood poured out to scratchy napkins every month, but she stopped at ten. She's as self-centered as kids go, but not vain as most teenagers are. It's difficult to dislike her. She says something, and you do a little internal dance somewhere in the duodenum, and smile. Patronizingly, condescendingly, happily, boringly---but you smile. There's nothing else to do.

I am cruel when I'm honest.